14 October 2012

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Albums and Singles

This EP is a taste of what to expect on their new album devoted to the theme of telepathy and psychic phenomena. I do not know whether Matmos actually buys the parapsychological theories that inspire the music but, like any of their conceptual experiments, they use the source material to think about their music in new ways. Some of it sounds undeniably like Matmos, but, as usual, they push themselves into novel situations with a long, complex vocal work which lines up with the peculiar subject matter perfectly.

Thrill Jockey

In work for several years now, elements of these songs have been incorporated into Matmos’ live sets in various different guises though only one of the pieces appears here as it did during live shows. The first two pieces are classic body-movers by the duo; "Very Large Green Triangles" takes its cue from the piece Matmos used to open their shows with but instead of being an atmospheric work, here it belts along with a fantastic rhythm which is bound to raise some spirits. Similarly, "You (Rrose Mix)" continues the musical theme with its deep, techno pulses. Hints of Coil’s Love’s Secret Domain peep through the cracks but overall this seems custom made to transform any regular horizontal surface into a dance floor.

At recent shows, the group have been using choirs of ordinary audience members in recreating the uncanny conditions of ganzfeld experiments. I had the luck to be involved in one such choir at their last performance here in Dublin. Each participant donned a pair of ganzfeld goggles (essentially small pieces of plastic which block out all visual stimuli, see here for an idea of the original experiments) and a pair of headphones. We were given an mp3 player with a track unique to each person: different speeches in strange, monotonous voices which we were supposed to repeat in the same manner as if receiving these voices from the ether.

The same method is used during "Just Waves" to create one of Matmos’ oddest tracks (and one that is completely at odds with the dance-orientated pieces that precede it on this EP). It sounds like a stream of consciousness as much as the reading of telepathic images (though what would telepathy be but the merging of two such streams?). While parapsychology as a field is something I have no time (it is kind of hard to be a neuroscientist and believe in the likes of telepathy) but I do love this aesthetic and the final results of Matmos’ musical experiment. The layers of voices (including Dan Deacon and Clodagh Simonds) form a weird confluence of sounds ranging from snippets of phrases to odd drones and hums. A keyboard fills in the background layer but it is those voices that steal the show.

To think this is just a foresight of what is to come on the new album, I eagerly anticipate where they go with it all.

 

14 October 2012

Albums and Singles

This EP is a taste of what to expect on their new album devoted to the theme of telepathy and psychic phenomena. I do not know whether Matmos actually buys the parapsychological theories that inspire the music but, like any of their conceptual experiments, they use the source material to think about their music in new ways. Some of it sounds undeniably like Matmos, but, as usual, they push themselves into novel situations with a long, complex vocal work which lines up with the peculiar subject matter perfectly.

Read more …

14 October 2012

Albums and Singles

This EP is a taste of what to expect on their new album devoted to the theme of telepathy and psychic phenomena. I do not know whether Matmos actually buys the parapsychological theories that inspire the music but, like any of their conceptual experiments, they use the source material to think about their music in new ways. Some of it sounds undeniably like Matmos but as usual they push themselves into novel situations with a long, complex vocal work which lines up with the peculiar subject matter perfectly.

Thrill Jockey

In work for several years now, elements of these songs have been incorporated into Matmos' live sets in various different guises though only one of the pieces appears here as it did during live shows. The first two pieces are classic body-movers by the duo; "Very Large Green Triangles" takes its cue from the piece Matmos used to open their shows with but instead of being an atmospheric work, here it belts along with a fantastic rhythm which is bound to raise some spirits. Similarly, "You (Rrose Mix)" continues the musical theme with its deep, techno pulses. Hints of Coil's Love's Secret Domain peep through the cracks but overall this is seems custom made to transform any regular horizontal surface into a dance floor.

At recent shows, the group have been using choirs of ordinary audience members in recreating the uncanny conditions of ganzfeld experiments. I had the luck to be involved in one such choir at their last performance here. Each participant donned a pair of ganzfeld goggles (essentially small pieces of plastic which block out all visual stimuli, see here for an idea of the original experiments) and a pair of headphones. We were given an mp3 player with a track unique to each person: different speeches in strange, monotonous voices which we were supposed to repeat in the same manner as if receiving these voices from the ether.

The same method is used during "Just Waves" to create one of Matmos' oddest tracks (and one that is completely at odds with the dance-orientated pieces that precede it on this EP). It sounds like a stream of consciousness as much as the reading of telepathic images (though what would telepathy be but the merging of two such streams?). While parapsychology as a field is something I have no time (it is kind of hard to be a neuroscientist and believe in the likes of telepathy) but I do love this aesthetic and the final results of Matmos' musical experiment. The layers of voices (including Dan Deacon and Clodagh Simonds) form a weird confluence of sounds ranging from snippets of phrases to odd drones and hums. A keyboard fills in the background layer but it is those voices that steal the show.

To think this is just a foresight of what is to come on the new album, I cannot wait to see where they go with it all.

samples:

• Very Large Green Triangles
• You (Rrose Mix)
• Just Waves

 

14 October 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

As far as Natural Snow Buildings-related albums go, this sprawling reissue ranks as a pretty monumental and eagerly anticipated event.  Originally released in a crazily limited edition of only 22, this 2008 triple-album is one of the band's most ambitious, yet rarely heard, statements.  Given Mehdi and Solange's tireless evolution over the years, Night Coercion understandably lacks the sophistication and song-craft of their current work, but mostly compensates for those shortcomings with a potent mixture of primal power and sheer massiveness.

Ba Da Bing

Looking back on Natural Snow Buildings' early career is pretty fascinating, as they released several epic, ambitious, and significantly different albums in a relatively short span for essentially no audience, all of which have since become much sought-after classics.  Night Coercion followed the heavily post-rock-influenced double-album The Winter Ray (2004) and the more "eerie folk" double-album The Dance of the Moon and the Sun (2006) and managed to somehow avoid sounding much like either.  While their dalliance in post-rock turned out to be short-lived, the rest of NSB's career has essentially been devoted to the blending and perfecting of the aesthetics pioneered on The Dance and this album, which leans quite heavily upon drone and quasi-pagan/medieval themes.  Curiously, however, the impact of those stylistic innovations is dwarfed by the sheer staggering scope of this effort: three hours of music divided into just 6 songs.  To put that in perspective, many fine bands do not record three hours of music over the course of their entire career.

Naturally, an album of such dauntingly epic length faces some inherent perils  The most obvious one is that it is an absolutely exhausting listening experience.  Then, of course, there is the second most obvious one: it is nearly impossible to record that much consistently compelling music at once (even if you are La Monte Young).  Most of these songs are built upon just one or two musical ideas stretched out and embellished for 20 or 30 minutes.  As a result, some stretches of Night Coercion definitely tend to overstay their welcome, like the 7-minute flute outro in "Kadja Bosou" or some of the prolonged bouts of roiling guitar squall that pepper the album.  I suspect Mehdi and Solange were completely aware of that though and were probably pleasantly surprised to find that there were actually 22 people who wanted to hear something so nakedly indulgent and experimental (I imagine asking "hey- do you want to hear my new 3-hour-long witch-themed drone opus?" is an excellent way to find out who your real friends and fans are).

Fortunately, such extreme length also offers great benefits.  For one, some ideas lend themselves beautifully to extended repetition, such as the weird, locked-groove-sounding "parade of the damned" opening to the aforementioned "Kadja Bosou."  Also, the more slow-burning, drone-based pieces tend to build up quite a bit of intensity when allowed such a long time to unfold.  It is also worth noting that one of Night Coercion's finest pieces ("The Great Bull God") is also its longest (by a lot), clocking in at an hour.  In fact, "Bull God" could easily have been the entire album, as it manages to cover all of the album's various stylistic facets over the course of its running time (uneasily discordant droning, ugly guitar noise, slightly off-key flutes, and subtly menacingly tribal/pagan percussion).

Night Coercion is not just notable for its length and stylistic innovations though–it is actually quite raw, scary, and lo-fi by Natural Snow Buildings standards.  Even the somewhat pastoral passages manage to have an uneasy shrillness and slightly wrong-sounding feel to them.  Also, some of the more dissonant pieces (such as "Brooms, Trapdoors, Keyholes") build up to crescendos that are pretty much full-on noise.  Nor are Mehdi and Solange particularly stingy with unleashing dense oceans of feedback.  The album's (lack of) production also plays a crucial role in setting the mood, as the murky "home-made black metal cassette" sound turns the already disturbing "howls of the undead" section of "Gorgons" into something truly nightmarish.

As a listening experience, however, Night Coercion is ultimately only a mixed success–I would describe it as more of an important and ambitious album than a great one (though "pretty good" seems fair).  There is definitely some music that sounds like absolutely no one else and there are a couple of truly memorable complete songs (particularly "Gorgons"), but there is no denying that there is quite a bit of bloat as well.  Also, the album's lengthy stretches of chaos and feedback are not quite as distinctive as the other facets of the duo's sound (even if they are quite visceral).  That said, I still probably would have been floored if I had heard this when it came out, as its weirder, more adventurous aspects necessarily seem perfectly normal to me after hearing all of the superior albums that followed in its wake.  Even now, it is far from a disappointment: I may prefer some of their other work, but this is the only logical choice if I want to block out the world and plunge myself into a black hole of prolonged Natural Snow Buildings immersion (which I will inevitably want to do with some regularity).

• Kadja Bosou
• Gorgons
• Brooms, Trapdoors, Keyholes

 

14 October 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Keith Rowe and Christian Wolff have been playing together since 1968, when Wolff first performed with AMM in the UK. Their history together goes back further, a part of the turbulent musical and political eddies set in motion by the New York School and Cornelius Cardew in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. But this performance, recorded live at NYC’s The Stone as part of Jon Abbey’s AMPLIFY 2011 festival, marks their first recorded appearance as a duo. It’s an inspired pairing. Together they produce quiet, sharp, and surprisingly gorgeous music that exemplifies the still radical ideas they started exploring over 40 years ago.

Erstwhile

The political side of Rowe and Wolff’s music isn’t always apparent, but it’s there, hidden in plain sight. Looking for it can be enlightening, but is unnecessary. The music they make together on ErstLive 010 stands all on its own. It is by turns gossamer thin and concrete, whisper quiet and abrasive, lucid and impenetrable. Keith’s contributions consist of physical noises drawn and scratched into the strings of his table-top guitar, along with live radio broadcasts and the buzz of electrical signals emanating from various electronic devices. Christian's contributions are on the piano and guitar. He hammers on the piano's keys, pulls and mutes the strings, and drums on its body, preferring to play around the piano rather than directly on it—the way pianos are typically played. At the guitar he makes small sounds; plucks a solitary note here, draws a bow across the strings there, and then sits quietly back waiting for the next move.

Both musicians punctuate their performances with these (near) silences. Their pauses break the performance up and keep it from coalescing, which means all the focus is on the discrete cells of sound they produce. Ideas are ventured and tweaked, and then left behind. Seconds pass and only the tiniest sounds are made. Keith sketches out an idea, and Christian climbs over it with the occasional crescendo. It all sounds very deliberate in retrospect, but as it’s happening, anything seems possible. Wolff the composer and Rowe the improviser make the line between their methods difficult to spot.

The quiet and deliberate pace of the music also calls attention to the performance space. September 4th was a hot night at The Stone, but the air conditioning and fans in the room were turned off while Keith and Christian played. With those noises out of the way, I wonder what other sounds were audible in that room. The recording itself, helped by Joe Panzner’s excellent mastering job, is clear and close to the musicians; many of the tiniest sounds they make are audible, but I’ve yet to catch a noise from the audience, or from outside.

And that strikes me as odd, because each time I have listened to ErstLive 010, some environmental sound has crept covertly into the music: the sound of clothes tumbling in the dryer downstairs, wind and rain pressing against the windows outside, the low hum of traffic in the distance. Even with headphones on, I’ve mistaken sounds coming from the neighbors upstairs for something in the mix. Without Rowe and Wolff physically present to contextualize the music, my neighbors and environment unwittingly participate in it, and I think that must have been true at The Stone that night, too.

After I noticed this the first time, the music transformed for me. It bled into the walls and out into the neighborhood. In his April 1998 interview with Perfect Sound Forever, Christian Wolff remarks that he has "a strong anti-rhetorical feeling – I don’t think that music should be manipulative. It should be there and people should be able to do with it what they can and what they want... So there’s that kind of attitude about a musical work. It should just be itself and relatively free from manipulation and calculation to the extent that it’s possible." ErstLive 010 exemplifies this. At the right volume, in the right circumstances, it can hide in book shelves, seep into the wood floors, and camouflage itself in sounds as small as a breath. Rowe and Wolff’s receptiveness to these tiny sounds, maybe even to subconscious and unintended ones, makes this effect possible. And the more open the music is, the deeper and more remarkable I perceive it to be, and the easier it is for me to spy the political and social ideas that have, at times, influenced their writing and performing.

The album ends unexpectedly, to the tune of humming amplifiers. I failed to notice it ending the first time. And the second. And even the third. In fact, I always fail to notice when the album ends unless I pay attention to the track time. Eventually the performance stops, but the sounds continue. They just happen, the way that many environmental sounds seem to. It’s as if Rowe and Wolff are disappearing into the music as they go, using it to get past or away from themselves. By the end, it’s as if they're not there at all.

samples:

• Excerpt 1
• Excerpt 2
• Excerpt 3

 

14 October 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Ged Gengras has been a somewhat ubiquitous and integral figure in the LA music scene for the last several years, contributing his varied talents to artists as disparate as LA Vampires, Pocahaunted, and Sun Araw.  However, I did not know that he had a solo "modular techno" project and had I known, I probably would not have been terribly inclined to seek it out.  Consequently, I was completely blindsided by the massive and wonderful 20-minute opening song on this, his debut full-length.  The other two songs do not quite reach the same heights, but it does not matter much, as "Spontaneous Generation" is almost enough of a must-hear instant classic to carry the whole album.

Peak Oil

On paper, Spontaneous Generation almost seems like a perfect storm of things that make me sigh wearily, combining retro synth fetishism, elitist genre revivalism, and song-less vamping.  However, much like the old cliche "it's the singer, not the song" suggests, the wielder of the modular synthesizers in this case manages to transform seemingly unpromising material into something quite compelling.  At least once, anyway, as the title piece turns a burbling synth bass sequence and a thumping drum machine in a dense, unstoppable juggernaut that sounds like a surly Tangerine Dream trying to level a dance club.  Or perhaps Detroit Techno, Acid,  or Chicago House re-envisioned by an especially hook-savvy noise artist (or preternaturally talented mental patient).  I mean all of that in the best possible way, of course, as minimalism has rarely sounded this muscular, wild, vibrant, and obsessive.  Gengras proves himself to be an absolute wizard at exploiting the infinite possibilities of relentless repetition, endlessly shifting the emphasis of the beat, modulating the bass line, and erupting into noisy and visceral flare-ups.  It is, quite simply, a tour de force.

Unsurprisingly, Ged is not quite able to recapture that magic with the two pieces on the second side of the album, despite adhering to what is essentially the same template (thumping beat + constantly morphing synth hook).  They both offer moments of inspiration though.  "Billions of Christic Atoms" starts quite promisingly with a flurry of wild bleeps, bloops, and squelches, but lacks the urgency and snowballing power of its predecessor.  The closing "Series of Energies," for its part, is endearingly loopy and chaotic, but its comparatively plodding central riff prevents it from building up enough momentum to catch fire.  The problem with working within such rigid self-constraints is that a one-riff vamp that extends for 10 or 20 minutes is going to live or die based upon the strength of that one riff.  Gengras always does a fine job tweaking his content into something vibrant and ingeniously mutating, but "Spontaneous Generation" is the only piece where he conjured up a bass pattern killer enough to hold it all together.

Of course, it is pretty damn impressive that Gengras did manage to find a hook hypnotic enough to ride for 20 gloriously weird and inhuman minutes.  Perhaps he will be able to do it again, perhaps not.  Either way, he has made me a believer in this quixotic project, as I never suspected that something so narrow and self-consciously retro could be so mesmerizing and intense.

Samples:

• Spontaneous Generation
• Billions of Christic Atoms
• Series of Energies

 

13 October 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Noise/drone legend Kevin Drumm has just released a new two-song album featuring contributions from Russell Haswell.

More information is available here.

13 October 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

LIMNOLOGY {BOOK + MUSIC CD} by Richard Skelton

Corbel Stone Press is excited to announce a major new work by Richard Skelton.

Limnology is a book about rivers, lakes and other inland waterways, comprising a sequence of word-lists, text rivers and myth-poems that explore the rich corpus of water words found in English, the dialect of Cumberland, Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Irish, Manx, Welsh and Proto-Celtic.

This 86-page, Royal 8vo book is printed on 135gsm uncoated paper throughout, and is perfect bound with a beautiful, 300gsm uncoated card cover.

Limnology is accompanied by a CD containing a new piece of river music - a single composition that has gradually accrued volume and pace over the past six years, swelling to nearly 30 minutes of vivid, and sometimes violent, intensity.

More information is available here.

12 October 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Artist: Psychic TV
Title: Live At Thee Ritz
Catalogue No: CSR173CD
Barcode: 5060174954146
Format: 2 x CD in jewelcase
Genre: Industrial / Esoteric
Shipping: 12th November

Pre-Order CD

Recorded on 6th November 1983, this is the complete, mostly unheard document of Psychic TV’s first ever show as a full live band, after their appearance at The Final Academy, with William S. Burroughs in 1982.

Originally issued on vinyl only in 1989 (in an edition of 5000 copies), rare tapes have been found to expand to a full double CD set, with updated sleeve notes and never before seen photos.

The classic PTV line-up: Genesis P-Orridge, Alex Fergusson, John Gosling (Zos Kia), Peter Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle, Coil), and Geff Rushton (Coil).

Tracks:

Disc 1: 1. Welcome | 2. Intro To... | 3. ...Thee Ritz | 4. Roman P. | 5. Thee Mad Organist | 6. Thee Full Pack | 7. Oi You Skinhead

Disc 2: 1. Eleusis | 2. Twisted | 3. New Will | 4. Unclean | 5. In Thee Nursery

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12 October 2012

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Albums and Singles

Artist: Edward Ka-Spel
Title: Tanith And The Lion Tree
Catalogue No: CSR171CD
Barcode: 5060174954153
Format: CD in digipak
Genre: Ethereal / Dark Folk / Experimental / Adult Fairytales
Shipping: 12th November

Pre-Order CD

Finally, Edward Ka-Spel’s genius 1991 album is given the re-mastering treatment, complete with bonus tracks.

Ballads coupled with a dark, malignant backdrop. A strange, mystical atmosphere carved out by texture and emotion.

Housed in a matt-laminate digipak, this is the ultimate solo album from The Legendary Pink Dots’ frontman. Previously unavailable on CD for 15 years. Digipak.

Tracks: 1. ‘O’ From The Great Sea | 2. Tanith And The Lion Tree | 3. Interference | 4. Four Out Of Ten | 5. Loop 1 | 6. Loop 2 | 7. The Bakersman | 8. Prithee | 9. Prisoners Of War | 10. Three Times Daily | 11. Hotel X | 12. Epilogue | 13. Phoney War | 14. Old Man Trouble | 15. Don’t Look ‘Til It’s Gone 2012 | 16. Prisoners Of War 2012 | 17. Loop 3

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | www.coldspring.co.uk | www.store.coldspring.co.uk